Until recently, the town of Cateura in Paraguay was known for just one thing: its rubbish dump.
The tip is embedded in the landscape like a steaming sore, towering over the ramshackle houses of the town's 10,000 residents and seeping into all aspects of their lives.
Trash from Paraguay's capital Asunción is dumped there, a confronting culmination of the wastefulness of urban life. Government initiatives attempting to deal with the environmental catastrophe have failed.
Unsurprisingly, Cateura is impoverished. To get by, people comb the piles of filth for scraps that can be sold.
However, the dump has also given Cateura something else, something it is much prouder of - the Recycled Orchestra. What began as free music lessons for children has evolved into a group renowned worldwide for performing classical music on instruments built from salvaged trash.
Landfill Harmonic charts the group's astonishing rise to fame through the eyes of the children, their teacher and parents. The world is not short of documentaries about the transformative power of music, but this one is visually remarkable; completely upending the notion of classical music as an elite, Western form of art.
It is a delight to watch the orchestra's instrument builder pull a rusty oil can out of the dump and wrestle it into an instrument capable of playing an intricate Bach partita, while held together by forks and wooden spoons. It is sobering to watch as that same piece of music drifts under pictures of rivers choked by rubbish, and livelihoods swallowed by floodwaters.
"If you're born in the wrong place, you don't have the right to dream," laments Favio Chávez, the orchestra's founder. He's an inspiring teacher and community advocate, and it's clear his initiative has had a major impact on its musicians and their families.
The magnitude of the group's achievements are overtly hinted at in the opening scene, which I thought was a bit of a shame as it rendered the rest of the chronological narrative less meaningful.
It also feels like there are a few pieces of the story missing.
Despite the window it provides into the children's lives, it left many questions: how do they learn to read music and master their instruments within such an apparently short time? Does learning music have any flow-on effects to their academic schooling? What is the attitude of others in the community, who do not receive the same opportunities as those in the orchestra?
Overall, Landfill Harmonic is a nice, heart-warming documentary about the hopefulness of music and opportunity in an otherwise hopeless place.
In Cateura, a violin is worth more than a house. So the saying "one man's trash is another's treasure" may never be more appropriate.
Three stars.
Landfill Harmonic is playing at the 2015 New Zealand Film Festival.
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Landfill Harmonic:: Directors: Brad Allgood, Graham Townsley:: Rating: Exempt:: Running Time: 84 minutes